PinMeTo Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Daniel Melkersson. He is building pinmeto, which offers a SaaS platform for managing business information and online conversations of large, multi location organizations across thousands of online services, apps, and other directories. They do this to boost brand management and drive foot traffic and increase sales. Daniel, you ready to take us to the top? [00:21] >> Yes. [00:22] Alright. So when we last spoke actually, we spoke a couple times, but you you communicated your your [00:27] sort of last round of funding was back in December 2020. I think a 2,000,000 series a, correct? [00:34] >> Yeah. Yeah. [00:35] And so we're gonna bridge back to how you funded the business since then if you raise any extra capital if you're planning to. But first, for people that missed our first episode together, who's paying for the pinmeto platform? [00:47] >> Our end customers? That's the question. [00:50] No. I I mean, obviously, Daniel, I know that. But who who are the customers? Who's paying for your technology? [00:55] >> Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Our customers are large, multi location brands. It can be anything from retailers like H and M to to car dealerships like Volvo. So yeah. [01:06] And so Volvo would use you across a 100 or so dealerships in a certain geography or or something like that, and and they would use you to drive traffic to those dealerships? [01:15] >> Yes. Exactly. Same thing with H and M, but for their stores. [01:19] Okay. And so how many customers are you working with now today? [01:22] >> It's around 500. [01:24] Okay. Around five so you said five fifty last time. Are you above five fifty now? Have you been have you decreased a little? [01:29] >> No. I've done it. It's around 500. I think it's if it was five fifty six, I am not 100% sure. It depends on how we calculate it because we usually, we don't calculate SMBs, which is which we call customers under 50 locations. But if I bring them in as well, it's over 700. So it's it's large companies. It's it's around 500. But if we calculate the few SMBs we have as well, it's over 700. [01:54] Okay. Okay. It makes sense. You obviously just split those into cohorts, but just to be clear, all 700 are paying at least a dollar per month. They're all paying customers. [02:01] >> Yes. Yeah. [02:01] Okay. Very cool. So how have you how have you been signing these folks up? Right? What's your go to market look like in terms of growth? [02:08] >> It's been we're doing b to b outbound sales mostly. Of course, we have a communication and a marketing department, but they are heavily focused on helping our SDRs to book more meetings and getting more in balance. Mhmm. Sales approach. [02:25] And how how many quota carrying reps do you have today? [02:29] >> Quota carrying, I would say 25. [02:31] About 25. And are you and what percent, I guess, of your total team do they make up? What's the total team size today? [02:39] >> Of the whole company or the sales team? [02:40] Whole company. [02:42] >> 85. [02:43] 85. So teach us a little bit about sales. A lot of founders are trying to scale their sales teams. You have a large chunk of your team dedicated to sales. Did you make any mistakes in your first couple sales hires? [02:53] >> Yes. Yes. A lot of them. I think that the biggest mistake or in the beginning, you're trying to do everything. You're the you're the startup. You're the founder. You're the sales guy. And then you hire a few salespeople that can do let's say, you can imitate yourself doing everything in sales. You book the meetings. You you you have the meetings. You close the deals. I would say, I'm gonna do this again, I'm gonna make sure to [03:17] >> to hire sales developers or to book the meetings and then sales managers to to handle the the quota carrying parts. [03:26] So what what's the ratio now? How many SDRs per AE? [03:31] >> It's something we we should be better at. I would say it's one to one at the moment. So we have one SDR for one sales manager. We would like to see two s one SDR to two sales managers, but still, it's quite big deals. It's not super small deals. So the SDRs is doing quite complicated outreach and very, very, very qualitative outreaches. So maybe the ratio is good. I don't know, maybe your data can tell me [03:58] >> something more about that, I don't know. [04:00] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect [04:23] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [04:48] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [05:09] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [05:35] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But [05:57] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:23] the interview. Take me into the life of a pinmeto account executive. Right? In a given week, how many demo calls are they probably doing? [06:33] >> Anything between, I would say, twelve and five. [06:37] I see. And then in a given month, what what quota do you expect them to hit? [06:43] >> In a given month, I don't see. I only have it in in in year and instead [06:47] Oh, year is fine. [06:47] >> Yeah. [06:49] >> Around 2,000,000. So 200,000. [06:52] Okay. So you 200,000. So you expect them to close to about 2,400,000 of new ARR each year? [06:58] >> Yeah. [06:59] Okay. That's a that's a lot. Do you have reps that are hitting that quota? [07:03] >> Yes. [07:04] Wow. Okay. That's impressive. I mean, most folks, you know, know, it's a million dollar quota target. How have you been able to get your reps to perform at such a high level? [07:13] >> I would say so it's maybe five out of the twenties hitting that target, but what they've done is they've been here a few years, between two to five two to four years, and they've built up quite a big number of leads they are working on. So it's everything between, you know, large companies and enterprise deals. So they have a few enterprise deals that they close every year, and then quite a lot of smaller ones. I think [07:39] >> that's So [07:40] do those AEs that have been with you for many years, do they get to keep the customers they signed three years ago and they count all the expansion revenue into their quota target? [07:48] >> No. They leave they leave that when we leave it to the onboarding team in CES to take over. [07:54] And why do believe it's an advantage that reps that have been with you for a longer period of time are hitting higher quota? I mean, you just said it was relationships years ago, right? [08:02] >> Yeah. They built up more relationships and some enterprise deals takes years. So [08:07] Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. Interesting. So, when you say, you know, deal prices are pretty big, mean, what's the average customer paying you per month or per year? [08:16] >> I just need to do it. [08:19] >> 1,500. [08:21] Per month or year? [08:23] >> Per month. [08:24] Per month. Okay. Got it. So, I mean, can can I take 1,500 per month times 700 customers? You're doing about 1,000,000 a month in revenue right now? [08:35] >> That should be more. Sorry. [08:37] You're doing you're doing more than 1,000,000 a month in revenue? [08:41] >> No. We're not. A little bit under. Yeah. [08:45] Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, because remember, you told me the 700 customer number. You said you also included your small SMBs in that. So maybe they're not Yeah. [08:51] >> Yeah. That's why that's why we're not I'm not calculating them. So you should take that number I said times 500 customers instead. That is close to the truth. [09:02] I see. I see. Okay. So I guess I should just ask you. So so what are you doing monthly right now in terms of monthly recurring revenue? [09:07] >> I know. Last year, we we we the ARR was 5,000,000, and now we're doing MRR, I would say, two hun two I don't have it in my head. Sorry. Sorry, Nathan. [09:23] No. That's okay. Take take your time. [09:29] >> I'll do this. [09:32] I mean, March is about to end. Right? So you have March's data, right, fresh on your brain. How much revenue did do in March? [09:37] >> Yeah. Around 50,000. [09:41] 50,000 in No. Total [09:43] >> No. No. No. No. No. No. I'm trying to do this from SEK dollar and [09:48] How about well, just let's just use SEK. How much SEK did you do in March? [09:53] >> We did [09:56] >> one divided in 12. So four million SEK or four hundred four hundred and twenty. Four hundred twenty we did. [10:05] Yeah. So so if you did [10:06] >> 4,000,000 if you did [10:08] 4,000,000 in March in terms of monthly recurring revenue, that's equivalent to about 440,000 United States dollars. [10:15] >> Yeah. Yeah. It used to be. Now, I think it's at I think US dollar is, like, 10 Swedish krona right now because the Swedish krona has been damaged quite badly by the work going on. [10:26] Yep. Yep. Okay. Got it. So you're doing about about 5.2, 5.3 in ARR today, which is great. How do you I mean, how do you plan to grow this year? And do you still have money left from the series a round to invest in growth? [10:38] >> Yeah. We have all the money left. So we did pretty much last year bootstrapped. [10:43] Now So just to clear, you you have million today. We're recording this on March 30. You've got about 2,000,000 in the bank. Yeah. Okay. And so what do you plan to use that money on to drive growth? [10:54] >> More more sales, and we're gonna grow and build more. We we call it hubs around Europe. We we work very remotely, but we have hubs. We have one in Poland for the Eastern Mark Eastern Europe, and then Portugal for Southern Europe, and and moving more into UK and Germany as well now. So we're gonna keep growing in Europe. [11:12] And where is your next hub gonna be? [11:16] >> Most probably Germany. [11:18] Germany. Okay. Interesting. Where [11:21] I guess, tell me about funding. Right? So do you do you plan to raise any additional capital here in the next, you know, six to twelve months? [11:28] >> Nope. [11:29] No additional capital needed. Do you regret I mean, you've raised what? How much have you raised to date? [11:35] >> Around 5,000,000 US. [11:36] Do you regret raising that money? No. No. I mean, you haven't really used it. Right? [11:43] >> No. Two of them we haven't used, but the rest we used before. So it's been you know, we did a year bootstrap, and then another year, we we used some money to grow faster. And then I don't know. Maybe it's very Swedish to be a little bit careful sometimes. Use, you know, use the money well. [11:58] No. I think it's fine. Was the last round really dilutive? [12:02] >> No. No. It wasn't. It was only by external or internal investors, and it wasn't much of a dilution for us. [12:11] What was the valuation that you raised the 2,000,000 at? [12:14] >> I don't remember. I'm sorry. I don't really remember what the valuation. I'm not even know if I am allowed to say it. [12:19] You told me on the last interview, was 2,000,000 on a '28 pre. So it was 30 post. Is that accurate? [12:25] >> Yeah. It is. I already told you then. [12:29] What do mean you don't remember? How do you not remember that? Equity is all that matters, and that's what takes equity from you is raising rounds. [12:36] >> Yeah. Yeah. But it it's it was back in 2020 and we're focusing on sales and growing the business since then. And, you know, we still have the money. So we're happy and, you know Fair. [12:45] Fair. Fair. Yeah. [12:46] >> Yeah. So you're able to you basically did that round and you only had to sell about 6% of the business. [12:51] So you still own I mean, you have three co founders too. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So what altogether, how much equity do you guys plus employees, like internal people still own? [13:00] >> Around 50. [13:02] 50. Okay. That's actually less than I thought. So investors own a pretty big you must have had very dilutive early rounds of financing then. [13:08] >> Yes. We had one round earlier that was a little bit too dilutive. [13:12] Was that the 2018 or 2017 round? [13:15] >> It was the 2018 round. [13:17] The the sort of first series a, 2,300,000. [13:21] >> Yeah. Yeah. [13:22] Okay. [13:22] >> The the the and it wasn't because of the round. It was because of things in the ownership and owners from before earlier on. So we kind of cleaned out the cap table, and it was a bit of a delusion there. [13:35] Oh, were you not the original owner? [13:38] >> I am the original owner. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It was just that the other owners that we won won't not want it on board anymore. So we needed to figure ways out to do that. [13:46] So if you bought back their equity, though, that should reverse dilution, not add more dilution? [13:52] >> No. No. The equity was actually sold to another investor that also invested. [13:57] Ah, I see. Okay. So their equity is still not inside the company. Another investor bought it and got a big chunk of the business. [14:05] >> Yes. [14:06] Okay. And that investor you're friendly with that investor, though. Right? It's not a nasty investor. [14:11] >> Absolutely. The the the head of the board is from that investor. So it was really good for the company, but they ended up with a little bit too much of a delusion like that. [14:21] I see. I see. How have you structured your board out there in Malmo? In The US, you know, there's a typical structure, but it differs depending on what country you're in. How have you structured your board? [14:30] >> It's it's it's it's me and the CEO and the two lead investors investors and and one one business angel that knows a lot about the business parts Mhmm. Though what we do. [14:43] So so there's five total. That one business angel, if there's a big disagreement on the board with that business side with you, your CEO and you, or the two investors? [14:55] >> I don't know really. It depends on what question. [14:58] Is he let me ask it directly. Is he your friend or their friend? Who came up with the idea to put that person on the board? [15:04] >> It it that was my idea way back, so I think it would go with us. [15:08] He'd probably go with you then. Okay. Interesting. Very cool. Anything else that you've been frustrated with that you feel like, you know, if you were based in The US, you would have been able to do x, but you can't because you're in Malmo? [15:20] >> It's always frustrating when you're from a small country, I think. Because when we started here, we thought, like, okay, we're gonna go for the biggest customers we can find early on, you know, around us without, you know, having to go to The US and outside Sweden. And large customers in Sweden are small customers in The US. So I think that is one of the that that I I I don't regret it. It was still a good [15:44] >> thing because we, you know, we're the number one in The Nordics and everything like that, but the markets are small. So you need to grow outside your borders really soon here. That's not that's not an issue in The US, you know. [15:54] The nice thing about your motion, you have 200 SMB clients and you've got about 550 more enterprise clients is there's a big pool of customers you can upsell to. I think you have pretty healthy net dollar retention numbers. Right? [16:06] >> It could be better. Once again, and this is something I regret before this interview, I should have known my numbers better. But but we we really that is one of our key KPIs to grow that because we actually [16:19] What do wanna hit it? What do you wanna hit? [16:20] >> A 150%. [16:22] Do you know what you're at now? [16:24] >> 105. [16:26] 105. Okay. Got it. And is that because churn is high or expansion is low? [16:30] >> Expansion is low. [16:32] >> We actually started our up sales, you know, more up sales team last year because we've been heavily focused on new new logos and new ARR in the company so far. [16:41] Tell me about the upsell team. Do they have a quota for expansion? Yeah. What's the quota? [16:48] >> This year, it's it's not that big. 500 US dollars this year. [16:53] 500,000? [16:55] >> Yeah. 500,000. [16:56] So that would be 10% expansion on 5,000,000 base? [17:00] >> Yeah. [17:00] And so do you the the the upsell reps, as you call them, that carry a quota, how do you assign do you give them, like, a million dollar book of business and they have to grow it, you know, 50% to 1,500,000? Or how do you how do you assign quota? [17:16] >> No. What we they are very, very focused on doing cross sales at the moment. So not not, you know, upselling, know, more seats or raising the price. So we have different product products on the platform. And new users are very focused on on one, the initial product, and now they sell the other products. And they have they are very open to do however they want. They focus from the largest ones and going down right now because [17:38] >> this is new for us. We don't we don't we try we did it in the CS organization, and this is something we did really wrong. So we had, like, what we we call our customer success success personnel that were doing upsells, which it's stupidest idea. Don't know why they did it. Because they need to take care of the customers first, make sure they're not churning. And when they have time and have an opportunity, they can do [18:00] >> some sales. Now we have customer success managers and up sales salespeople, sales managers, which huge difference. [18:09] Interesting. Well, we'll see how it pans out. Alright? It sounds like an interesting strategy. But in the meantime, Daniel, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [18:17] >> Yeah. I'm I'm actually I have a book here. Choose happiness because you need to be happy as well when you're doing this entrepreneurship thing. So by Kay Pollak, a Swedish, really good writer. [18:28] Number two is there reading now. Is there a CEO you're following or studying? [18:34] >> Different one. I've been following Ben Horowitz lately because I missed him from before. [18:41] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building pinmeto? [18:47] >> Pipedrive for sales and Planhat for the CS organization. [18:51] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [18:55] >> Six to eight. [18:57] And situation, married, single, kiddos? Divorced, two kids. Still 45 or you have a birthday? [19:05] >> I had a birthday. [19:07] He's 40 Yeah. Happy birthday. Alright. Last last question, Daniel. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [19:18] >> Not really. Yes. Yes. Go for it. Have fun. Things will pan out. [19:23] Guys, there you have it. Daniel's building pinmeto, which is specifically helping gas stations, retail organizations understand marketing across many specific physical locations. They've got over 700 total customers today, about 500 he categorized as enterprise. They're doing 5,200,000 in terms of annual run rate right now, which is $440,000 in March revenue when you extrapolate that out. 85 on the team today, 25 quota carrying reps, some of them hitting a $2,400,000 quota, which is impressive. We'll watch them [19:52] closely. He's done this pretty efficiently in terms of capital. He's raised basically $4,000,000 to grow a $5,200,000 business, which is obviously great capital efficiency. So Daniel, thanks for taking us to the top. [20:02] >> Thank you. [20:04] One more thing before you go. Have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM Central. [20:30] Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise, [20:52] a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [21:13] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [21:33] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. [21:40] >> See you.

Introduction hey folks my guest today is daniel melkerson he is the ceo in front of a company called pin me two it's a sas platform that connects multi-location brands with the biggest search map and social media platforms letting them keep their business information up to date everywhere manage reviews and maximize their social reach all from one place daniel you ready to take to the top yeah sure this is great so like if i own a little restaurant in austin texas and i need my google place thing updated and my search results updated and my you know my whatever yelp thing updated i can basically manage my metadata on pin me too yeah exactly so you we we we got one platform to handle all all sorts of listing networks around the world could be a search network could be map services gps services in cars and social media services now when you last came on back in 2019 this was pre-coveted which is sort of interesting i remember you saying i believe you had let's see about 200 customers uh you were selling it for about 800 bucks a month and so you were doing right around a 2 million run rate how did cobit impact you uh we got really scared in march last year but but we what we did then was that actually we we contacted the customers we had in in hospitality industry uh and just said okay let's pause your your payments for the upcoming three months and see what happens with kovid and then after four months everyone was back and paying again so i think that was a good thing that we actually reached out but and we we we've been keeping growing pretty okay uh very very low churn still we're very focused on location-based businesses a lot of them got hurt during covid but on the other hand a lot of the retailers needed our tool to you know say these stories is closed now because of kovid or they want to go out and say hey all these stores in in for example in shanghai needs to be closed now but we open up soon again and and so so it's been good for us and we also switch focus when it comes to the verticals we sell to so we focused a lot on on the verticals that are you know still alive and and kicking during covid so i think we we did good yeah and so how many pain customers do you have today Currently serving 550 customers and what verticals are your top three so we have around 550 paying customers today uh the top three verticals are still retail also ev charging and gas stations uh kind of goes hand in hand today yes it just needs to pivot into eb chartings as well so and so that's the two biggest i guess and then then i would say hospitality still yeah hospitality interesting and are you still is the average customer still paying you about 800 bucks a month yeah around 800 a little bit above 800 i would say 900 today and dig into your pricing a bit for my audience here what's the difference between paying you 200 bucks a month versus 10 000 a month in other words what do you upsell against so we we upsell against the number of locations because they're location-based businesses multi-location businesses for example uh one of the customers work with h m they have stores all around the world so they pay per per store uh so we upsell with the number of locations if they grow by locations and then we cross sell uh with other products on the platform i see okay location-based upselling feature-based upselling that's both great help me understand don't name the customer obviously but what's the your largest customer account what are they paying you per year they're paying us [Music] 300 000 u.s okay that's getting up there and you're probably getting i mean are you generally moving upstream or downstream uh we we're really trying to move upstream and i think we are but we can't all have the same kind of uh average uh deal size the last two years and i think we we're doing really good there so hey if it works there's a model for everyone right so if it's working it's working right and from what i hear you say is you had 200 customers two years ago you have 550 now that sounds like pretty good growth to me yeah i would say not super big enterprises it's our sweet spot but large multi-location businesses yep that's now you shared last time you did not Raised bootstrap this you raised 25k seat around in 2014 you raised i think 580 000 venture around in 2017 and you raised i think 2.3 million series a in 2018 are those correct yes yes can be raised since then or no yes yes the small round with the the investors we already had on board uh almost a year ago now but we haven't used the money yet so that's that's a good thing we kind of did it just because of we could it was a good opportunity yeah so it's an insider round and are we talking like a million or like 10 million no no it's a small it's uh it's uh two to two million about two million okay yeah so then to date you raised total something like five million bucks yeah interesting and and and so were you just nervous about cause obviously you got diluted raising another two million from insiders about a year ago but you're also probably nervous about kobe cash cushion probably feels good why'd you do it yeah we did it because of growth uh to to hire more people open new new offices uh especially sales offices but we we kind of had a good year when it comes to sales so we we we have done what we wanted this year without using the money we we took in the last round but we thought we're really gonna try to use them next year but as long as we can grow with the with the customers money that's that's a great thing you know so you have more than two million cash in the bank today yes that's great so yeah nice cushion you can use it for hiring acquiring whatever you want how many folks on the team today uh almost 80 i think 78 78 wow okay very cool now talk to me a little bit more about what you think like next moves are here right how do you go i'm guessing here if you have 550 Monthly recurring revenue customers at 800 bucks a month you're doing about 5.2 million in terms of run rate right now yeah how do you go from 5.2 up to like you know 10 or 20 million bucks in revenue uh the our the focus we have we are very sales oriented company so very much sales excellence we are opening new hubs uh around the world working very locally when it comes to the culture of the sales people so for example what we're trying to keep the costs down so for example i can give you an example in europe there's very different from country to country the cost of living and the cost of you know having employees and so on so but but in sales you know it's all about you know uh feeling the other person comfortable and that you the person is selling you has the same culture as you and so on so for example we have quite a lot of people born and raised in the uk living in poland today for different reasons and we have them selling to the uk which for us is way way cheaper to have people hired in poland but still they sell in the uk and and the customers in the uk and the leads we talked to they they experienced them as you know a uk office how many how many sales reps do you have then today that have a quota uh around forty thirty-five that's a massive sale they all carry a quota they at 35 carry a quota for sure wow okay so the total sales seems like 40 and then quarter carrying is 35. yeah we that it's we hi what we hired this year was sales people so wow we didn't what's their quota daniel well if i if i joined let's say you hired me this year what would you tell me my first year quota is yeah it depends on what what what market you're you're selling to uh because we always see that the first six months it's it's like just getting getting started make sure you have enough quotes out and then you start closing deals so the first thing six months i wouldn't say you have any quota but you need to have a lot of momentum uh make sure you have a lot of quotes out a lot of meetings and from that on i would say in in us dollars per month around 10 000 that's it for the first year and then you ramp it up so i should be closing 10 000 of new monthly recurring revenue per month as a sales rep uh yeah after a year after a year yeah after a year yeah yeah so if it's 10k a month of new mrr and i do that as a sales rep for you for 12 months i'm basically each sales rep should be adding about 120 000 bucks of new monthly recurring revenue annually yeah now obviously your whole sales team is not ramped up yet because if you did that with 35 people you'd be doing 30 40 50 million bucks in revenue we're not we we were only not even half of those people when we went into 2021 wow yeah so so many of them are still in that six month period where you're still ramping them up exactly yeah very interesting and do you follow toward a sort of standard here in other words ignore the ramp up period once the sales reps fully onboarded are they making you know 200 000 bucks on target earnings if they hit their million dollar quota is that sort of the range yeah it is i would say you're quite right there yeah yeah i mean there's a pretty standard playbook there so i only want to ask more questions if you're deviating from the playbook for any reason no we're boring [Laughter] i don't think you're boring i think you're doing all right you're doing the right thing no no yeah but i think the playbook you're talking about i think that's the one most people should go by it's it's it's a good one and how many engineers are on the team it's uh around 12 12 i think now yeah okay cool we're trying to ramp that up but it's hard it's not what makes it hard it's hard to hire it's not hard to hire developers if you can go whatever but we also want really specialized in what we do that are familiar you know where you used to work with the with the big tech companies and the technologies they use and so on so we're quite picky uh when it comes to the developers we want and we also try to keep them quite close so we we have done a lot of people that actually moved to sweden for a different reason from us from china from all over the world to work close by so we try to keep the team really close and and and maybe this is against what everyone says today we we really like that actually to have the possibility to physically meet up because r d works better that way that's just the way i see things faster not bad maybe not better but faster yeah and talk to me a bit about churn here at this price point what's gross churn what's expansion what's net dollar retention [Music] oh i don't have all the numbers sorry in my head but i we have a gross tone around three percent okay annually or monthly annually on revenue okay yep uh you told me two years ago your expansion was about 20 do you feel like you're doing a better job expanding today than you were then i think we're doing pretty much the same we have a lot more to to do here we have been so focused on you know go get new customers in so we we really this year is the first year we really focused on up sales and cross sales so daniel how do you how does pin penny two fit into like how you think about your personal net worth and your personal well-being like and can you think can you be sort of greedy here are you the sole founder no no we we are three founders uh and a few investors yep so did you guys split the three pounders did you guys split it evenly back in 2014 or 2013 yes oh interesting okay got it so 33 33 33 you've brought on some of these investors um how do you i mean you just raised the 2 million insight around usually that's you're selling like what 10 to 15 percent of the business doing that no well it was actually less oh wow okay oh that's cool that's a big deal that's great i mean that's great anytime you hear something that's not standard i want to understand why so how were you able to get away with raising two million and selling less than ten percent uh all the investors that were already on board was quite happy what they already have and also could see that with the money now we can really really grow and make more value of the the uh the the ownership they already had okay so it wasn't that bad that delusion in that round yeah i mean what i mean was it less than five percent i won't push you harder than that it was pretty much in the middle of five and ten okay got it got it got it yeah so you were raising that i mean that was basically what is that a 28 million dollar pre-money valuation something like that something like that so so so daniel i would argue that's actually a fairly low multiple if you're doing five four million in revenue when you did that deal that's basically 5x multiple but i've seen deals worth i mean these are like 10 20 30 x multiples why didn't you run a formal process and try and get some more competition to focus on the business yeah so this was a quick round that's it get money quick it wasn't a long process yeah yeah and just make everyone happy you know we have really good owners and investors so yes okay let's let's just do this yeah and keep working with the business and it's my math right if you're doing about 440 000 a month today in revenue you were doing about 350 000 exactly a year ago yeah a little bit less actually a little less okay yes i mean this is great this is a good growth story now it's been a year since that last race you know world's coming out of cova do you guys have great momentum are you looking at raising right now no no no i'm not 100 sure we we will do that uh there's a there's so many good other solutions today i know you have one for example and so on for businesses i would love to work we've got 100 million bucks we have to put to work so i would love to work with you yeah so we probably look at that kind of structure instead of maybe racing in you know the usual way yeah i love that i love the alternative approach now what is that approach like in sweden i mean do you have a lot of options or is it hard i mean you probably have government programs and you're insiders what about what's the rest of the ecosystem like there's more and more uh you know solutions for for landing uh i i just this is new it's just started a new company doing this a new fun doing this and people you know been working with the larger banks they got tired of you know they saw the opportunity and started their own funds now yeah so there's more and more of that coming in in in in sweden and and in this part of europe as well after dilution again you raised you know through a series a now i'm gonna maybe guess you still on like 15 to 20 of the company personally so let's say like the reason i'm asking this is a lot of founders at your stage they look at their equity value and they go man i really want to go buy a house or have some kids or start a family but all my net worth is typed in my sas company do you ever have that feeling and what are your options to like potentially diversify i already have the kids i've already done the whole thing i've done the kids i've done the divorce so you're past your life mvp uh i've passed i i've already peaked so everything is a bonus from here not really not really i'm quite happy where i am right now i i have a really good co-ceo now i i can do a lot of things within the company that i love to do where i really see that i put still put a lot of value into the company so no stress at all on the private side if someone like of an investor listening and came and offered each of you three co-founders a million each so three million total for 15 percent but you guys could take it all personally as secondary do you i mean is that something that early stage founders i mean does that get you excited or no i'm not excited but i cannot talk for my other two coffee what about you is that your wife behind you that just walked by no it was actually my son he's just got long hair and oh my gosh sorry about that he has that's a that's like my brother he has like super long hair he like plays guitar in the woods all day he's great all right apologize for that that's that same kind of guy like you have to pop by behind me i love that all right very cool let's wrap up here uh daniel number one what's your favorite business book uh oh uh let's see i'm actually reading scaling up right now it's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i always like gary vaynerchuk because he's the way he is yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for scaling pin me too uh i would say plan hat and union both swedish planet what do you use what do you use to manage all your remote employees like to pay them out like payroll taxes all that kind of stuff we're using a swedish company called fort knox interesting yeah yeah it's a swedish company they're all union is a swedish company to do invoices for sas really interesting company if you want to talk to another swedish interesting company i'd love to i want to feature more swedish founders so now i would love that intro that'd be great and then then the other one is plan hat for customer success also really good too so okay number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh between six and eight okay and situation in a married single did you remarry no okay so single so divorce how many kiddos two two kids okay and how old are you daniel i'm 45. 45. last question something you wishing you knew when you were 20. that i did exactly what i did when i was 20 enjoy life you can do other things later on guys there you have it pin me two helps 550 customers like gas stations or ev charging stations restaurants manage their metadata across google search reviews yelp etc they're now charging about they're doing about 800 per month per customer so they're doing about 440 000 a month up from 340 thousand or 320 000 about a year ago so healthy growth uh they just raised another two million dollar and an insider round it caught like a 28 million dollar valuation but very very capital efficient they have less money raised than their total revenue run rate today which we love daniel thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is daniel melkerson he's building a company called pin me too it's a technology designed only for the needs of multi-location brands and organizations to connect and take control over digital brand experience which means boosting brand engagement driving foot traffic and achieving real results daniel you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right very good so tell us what the company does and are you pure place ass yes we are pure play sas company and what we do you explained it very very well so we help multi-location businesses could be our focused verticals is retail hotels uh restaurants but it needs to be a chain so it needs to have multiple locations look in locations uh awfully national or globally so what we do is that we help them for if someone searches for them online for example we make sure that they are if you search for a restaurant in los angeles we make sure our customers restaurants concepts in the search results before the their competitors interests our aim and goal with the company and also what we do is that we have a toolkit so and as i said all our customers are multilocation brand so if you're a multi-location brand for example you you if you have a hundred or a thousand locations all over the world then you will have uh customers coming to you online making reviews they try to connect to you and ask questions and they do that for every single location and that is often really really hard for the one especially if you're like a restaurant you have some people running that restaurant and they don't have time or the skills to handle reviews or talk to answer comments on facebook or other social media so we built a tool for i think that's the head office to handle that yeah i think i think that product makes sense to walk me through all people pay so on average what's a brand going to pay you per month to use the technology oh in average uh the average customer is around 800 u.s okay and what does that mean in terms of how many locations are they typically covering oh i always say our median customer has 120 locations but we have customers in between 40 locations up to thousands a couple of thousand locations 40 to a couple thousands yeah okay interesting that makes good sense and then what i mean so are you employing a sales model that is more like an enterprise sale or mid-market or an smb yeah with more more enterprise because a chain is never a small business yeah it's a clean business it's always large too and very good so what year do you launch the company uh we well we launched this the product in the company in the beginning of 2015 but we launched the company in 2013 and i think we got the story that is quite different from others we just had a team where i have developers we were friends so let's start a business and see what we do so so we did quite a dif different things in the beginning but we launched this product uh in the beginning of 2015. okay very good so 2013 and 2015 and how many customers have you scaled to today well about 200 okay 200. and then have you decided to bootstrap the company or did you or did you guys decide to raise we decided to race that's also another thing i i've built companies before uh organically and and this time i just wanted to see how the vc world works so there was a decision from the beginning to raise money yes how much have you raised and we have raised so far about 3.7 million us three seven okay and was most that equity or debt it's only equity it's all equity okay that's good and then i mean can i take 200 customers time i mean you listen so you know i was going to do this right 200 customers times 800 bucks a month you're doing about 160 000 a month right now in revenue yeah and where were you a year ago uh we have doubled since last year so half a little bit more yeah half that where did daniel where'd most that growth come from kind of new customers or driving expansion revenue on historical customers new customers we actually started up sales and or we did some trials with dubsteps last year where we started this this year so absolutely mostly from you customers yes and where are you finding them walk me through kind of your growth channels today uh you mean finding new customers yeah where are you finding new customers oh it's a swedish company as i i think i don't know if you talked about it before but so our our core markets in the scandinavia but we also have an inside sales organization that is built up for sales developers and sales managers and so on and we good where we go out globally in different verticals so it's both from head office with inside sales but also with field sales offices in and all the scandinavian capitals and also in poland thailand interesting wait you said poland thailand yeah so poland scandinavia and thai and thailand yeah interesting okay that sounds like you just wanted to open in thailand so you had an excuse to go to bali every once in a while ah no it's but i i it's opportunity based we knew good people that actually could start it and run it in thailand so what are you i mean field sales is tricky at a 800 per month price point average that's 10 grand a month there's not a lot of margin there to pay the salesperson commission pay for fights etc what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost on a ten thousand dollar of your account oh wow oh let me see where do i have that uh and probably under cac yeah cac is uh 8 600 okay us okay and that's for a ten thousand dollar a year account uh no yeah it's it's uh it's a it's about that uh it's uh yeah about 10 000. okay so you have about 11 or 12 month payback period yeah 12.9 to be exact right now okay interesting and it sounds like you are now flirting with driving a system to drive expansion revenue on older cohorts so let's dive into that now what is your expense of the customers who signed up exactly one year ago um what did you expand that customer base by or in terms of the revenue they paid uh so far i would say 15 to 20 okay and how much of the revenue from that same core churned over the past 12 months oh we had very little shown it's under three percent per year okay so three percent revenue churn annually 20 expansion will put you at net revenue retention of about 117 percent annually does that sound right yeah that sounds right yeah pretty healthy what's the team look like today how many people uh we're 45 but we were like 25 six to eight months ago so we started the scaling okay very good company so 45 folks and where are most the hires are they sales people engineers customer success uh it's we hired a lot in all of them lately but we are scaling mostly within sales now okay very good and then i assume you're burning capital because of how much you've raised is that right yeah we burned since october last year but 10 months before that we actually were cash positive for 10 months oh great so i mean when you say i had some time to figure things out so when you say burning are we talking like 10 grand a month or 100 grand a month about how much are you burning monthly uh under 100 under 100 okay fair enough so you have i mean what does that give you like more than 18 months of runway yeah when do you think you'd raise again are you are you raising now uh we're not racing now but probably during spring okay and and if you raise in the spring why would that be the right time to raise uh we have good momentum now and also the investors we have on board uh are also want us to scale faster so i think there's also an opportunity in the market for us do you know how much you would target to raise at least uh no i i i don't feel comfortable talking about that already because it's it's a bit we haven't made the decision yeah yeah i think that makes sense i mean if you've already raised 3.7 i mean you've got to be thinking obviously in the millions right three four five million something like that yeah yeah absolutely i don't like to you know when i don't like to say i want to say an exact number since i don't have it but yeah you're within that yeah that's cool very good um okay uh let me see here let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh the latest i read was uh scaling up mastering the rockefeller habits by bernhanisch that's a good one i like that one purple number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not really i follow gary vaynerchuk but that's more like because i like him like his style and his yeah number three what's your funny what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh wow i would say within sales pipedrive uh for customer success plan hat that's the two i work mostly with number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six to eight and what's your situation married single kids married two kids that's good and how are you i'm 43 43 last question daniel what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i would say listen more talk less ask questions guys pin me to helping folks manage better manage individual locations especially big restaurant chains or places with a lot of physical locations over 200 customers today each customer paying more than 800 per month so 160 000 per month right now in revenue that's double year every year from 80 000 a month just a year ago they're burning less than 100 grand per month right now in terms of again net burn they've raised 3.7 million team of 45 people churning three percent of their customer revenue annually but expanding that same court 20 percent so 117 percent net revenue retention with about a 12 month payback period in terms of cac uh divided into again first year ac v daniel thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much thank you